As I write this United Airlines is being excoriated by everyone with a social media account, or a cable show, for the disaster they created by, first, violently removing a 69-year-old man from a plane so they could sit one of their own employees in the crowded flight, and then second, completely and thoroughly botching the public relations fiasco that ensued. If there was a crisis PR component they didn’t thoroughly screw up, I don’t know what it is.
There’s been a lot of talk about airline policy, what United should or should not have donewhen they tried to solve the problem – of their own making – when they overbooked that flight. What I’m concerned with here, however, is the second part of this story, how United handled PR and corporate messaging as all the horror hit the fan.
What a mess
And hit the fan it did. The incident on the plane happened on Sunday, 9 April. The video of the screaming passenger being dragged up the aisle by police hit the media on Monday. This was bad enough. Then CEO Oscar Munoz thought it was a great idea to write a widely distributed note that praised how staffers handled the situation, which he described as “having to re-accommodate these customers,” an appalling bit of corporate jargon. He went on to blame the passenger for being “disruptive and belligerent,” but of course everyone who heard that saw themselves in the poor man being dragged away, bleeding from the mouth, and imagined how they would like being forcibly tossed out of a plane after buying a ticket, boarding the plane, and settling down in their seat. Most probably thought they’d get a little belligerent too.
By Tuesday things really had kicked into gear. United stock took a nose dive, at one point losing over $3 a share and at its worst moment slicing off nearly $900 million from the company’s market cap. The memes were plentiful, very funny, and brutal toward the airline. Twitter had a couple of hash tags of imagined new United mottos, full of snarky disdain for the way United had decided to treat their customers (“We put the ‘hospital’ in ‘hospitality’”). The passenger was Asian-American, and many – especially Chinese observers – thought some racism was involved. Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show created a fake United ad filled with passenger abuse and an obscene tag line. The criticisms and satire went on and on.
The US Department of Transportation even said they were reviewing the incident to see if United complied with regulations. While it is legal for airlines to bump passengers, there are standards for how that is supposed to be handled. Airlines must “give all passengers who are bumped involuntarily a written statement describing their rights and explaining how the carrier decides who gets on an oversold flight and who doesn’t.” It does not appear that United did so.
And all the way through Tuesday, United doubled and tripled down, talking about their right to do what they did, and somehow forgetting that when you show hostility and condescension to your customer base, things don’t go well for you. Eventually some kind of adult supervision must have entered the boardroom, because CEO Munoz finally issued a new statement late Tuesday that contained an apology and a commitment to reviewing how they put themselves into this mess: “I promise you we will do better,” he wrote. Nice sentiment, two days too late.
Customers said that the airline had offered as much as $800 for passengers to give up their seat, while Munoz claimed it was $1000. But really, it could have been $250,000 a seat and it would have been a bargain, considering how much United lost in stock value, in brand reputation, and for all we know a looming civil lawsuit.
Company brand, personal brand
And perhaps it is CEO Munoz who lost the most, since he came off as a tone-deaf, arrogant executive who had no empathy whatsoever for his customers. Ironically, Munoz had just a month earlier been named the US Communicator of the Year by PRWeek, which described him as a “smart, dedicated and excellent leader who understands the value of communications,” which now seems ridiculously off the mark. (PRWeek has taken its own share of sarcasm for giving Munoz this award.)
To be fair, that award seems based more on his internal communications: “Munoz won praise from union bosses for his easy rapport with shop-floor workers, a rarity in any industry,” PRWeek said in their award article. “Undertaking an extensive meet-and-greet tour across the United network, Munoz rebuilt employee confidence in the airline brand. He connected well with the airline’s pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and other workers partly because of his blue-collar roots – his father was a union meat cutter – and he hasn’t been shy opening up to employees or media about his heart problems. He invited Fortune to follow him on the job, which resulted in a highly positive feature.”
All of which is terrific. But it isn’t the same as empathizing and connecting with customers and the general public in the open air of the external marketplace in the middle of a crisis. And that they completely failed to do.
This is hardly the only time United has been raked over the coals by the public for their corporate attitude, and should have known better. For example, back in 2008, seven years before Munoz took over the reins, there was an infamous incident with a musician where United stubbornly refused to pay $1200 to replace a guitar their people had broken, and the musician posted a few songs about how United Breaks Guitars… which have garnered nearly 20 million views on YouTube so far. The story even became one of the series of Hitler-in-the-bunker videos (you either know what I mean by that, or you don’t).
Not to mention that bizarre incident a few weeks ago with the leggings. United must feel they have tons of extra brand equity to throw away, considering how careless they are in protecting it.
So what should United have done?
This isn’t really hard, and any seasoned communications professional should have known what to do. The head of corporate comms for United should have enough gravitas as well to pull Munoz back from digging himself and the company a deeper, uglier hole. Who knows why they botched it so badly, but they did. Here is what United should have done:
Anticipate. They should have, first of all, anticipated that this would happen someday. Airlines overbook all the time, and sometimes resort to involuntary seating bumps. Sooner or later someone was going to refuse to leave their seat. Thinking about the situation for more than five minutes would have alerted them to what a PR mess it could turn out to be if not prepared.
Train your people. The best way to handle a situation like this is never let it occur in the first place. Some scenarios are a surprise, but not this one. There should be standards and preparation: more transparent communication at the gate, more flexibility in financial offers to potential volunteers, and a common-sense escalation process that should never, ever involve having police drag a paying customer down an aisle just because he wanted to get home.
Establish protocols. When things start to go south, have a crisis PR playbook. Who are your spokespeople? Are they trained to talk to the media? Who will give them their talking points? Who will review every statement and social media post before it is published to make sure it isn’t making matters worse? Who is going to remind the CEO that they may be the boss but they are not the last word in corporate communications, and they need to listen to counsel?
Get help. You need to monitor what is going on out there as the crisis evolves. That requires a lot of listening. Get a bunch of your people, and your agency if you have one, paying attention to what is being said across all the channels, and reporting back. You can’t respond to, or get in front of, a trend if you don’t even know that the trend exists.
Model the behavior. Executive leadership needs to show the kind of demeanor, and convey the kinds of messages, that you want everyone in your company to emulate, and which they will feel comfortable emulating. All of your personnel are brand representatives in normal circumstances, but especially so during a crisis. If your CEO tries to position dragging a bleeding, screaming 69-year-old man down the aisle as “re-accommodating the customer,” it is embarrassing enough. But do you honestly think your workers are going to use that ridiculous phrase when they try to defend their company at the next neighborhood party? Not likely. Carelessly using jargon like that, you both invite ridicule and lose your brand ambassadors on the street.
Do the work. Assess, acknowledge, talk about the future. Gather the facts, do your analysis, adjust your messaging, be honest at all times, admit your mistakes, and address your intentions for how to make things better starting right now. You are the subject of derision on social media, the butt of jokes on late night television, and you are scaring away investors. Stop pretending you can go to lunch and it will all blow over. Suit up and engage with reality. Learn from this and take steps to never have it happen again, and if it does, ensure that you will handle it better next time.
Originally published on LinkedIn on 11 April 2017.